I as well just saw Triple Frontier, but I can’t say I liked it very much. It’s super weirdly paced, and constantly felt like I was waiting for the “proper” movie to start.
The film also failed to make me care about the characters. I got the feeling at Ben Affleck’s character was supposed to have the feel of a sort of recovering alcoholic who is pulled back out to drink by his friends, and falls hard as a result but that never crystallized for me, so him risking continually risking his team just made me dislike the character.

Shooting large parts of the film in Hawaii seems like a mistake to me. Parts of it are easily identifiable as Hawaii as opposed to South America.

The actors are all good though, and I quite liked how it was shot, as well as the soundtrack.

not quite as good as Get Out but that was already way above the average movie, and this is as well. shoutout to Lupita Nyong’o who did a fantastic job playing the protagonist and her “tethered” doppelganger Red

it strikes the perfect balance between fun and fucking terrifying, largely thanks to Winston Duke’s role as the main comic relief character. most of the scares aren’t jumpscares and the ones that are never feel cheap or unearned

am I a fan of the direction the story takes later on? not entirely. I was sold on something more supernatural but then it becomes more sci-fi which I’m a bit tired of in stories like this. the ending however and the details it reveals shook me a little bit and made me want to rewatch it knowing how all the pieces click together

When I was in Iraq that book had just come out. We were all reading it and then one of the guys I was out there with talked to his wife in the phone and she was going to their reunion tour with a couple of her friends. We all joked that he’d come home to a pregnant wife !!

I also just watched The Dirt on Netflix.Even though I didn’t know much about Motley Crue I loved the movie!!The whole direction and especially the performances of the band members actors were at very top quality!!It made me feel like I was part of their tour!!It was hilarious at some points (Ozzy \m/ surpassed them on freakness ) but I appreciate they showed us their addictions and other crazy stuff , straight forward without trying to hide or shine them.Last but not least,the amazing (original of course :p) soundtrack is definitely a reason to start being a fan of this band!!

Shazam! is the most fun superhero movie in a LONG time. The jokes really landed with everybody in the theatre (which was full) and I think that’s very impressive as superhero movies usually suck at judging when is the right time for comedy. Probably my favourite recent DC movie (would be my favourite DC movie if not for Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy).

My only gripe is that the villain is a bit cookie-cutter and formulaic but Mark Strong delivers a decent performance as always, just enough that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the film

Saw Us. I want to preface this by saying that Get Out was one of my favourites of 2017, and I consider 2017 to be a pretty excellent year for film in general.

Unfortunately, I did not really like Us. I felt that it relied too heavily on its themes, the established reality felt like it was at odds with itself and the conclusion doesn’t work well or feel effective imo. That said, the acting was quite good and the directing itself was solid. I just felt that there were big problems with the script.

I felt that it relied too heavily on its themes, the established reality felt like it was at odds with itself and the conclusion doesn’t work well or feel effective imo.

I have to agree with this. While I did like the movie, the explanation behind it just doesn’t add up. Somehow some secret group manages to clone the entire human race or at least everyone in the USA, feeds them an endless supply of rabbits and then just decides to ditch them because it didn’t work out? The plot of Get Out seems somewhat possible. Us on the other hand might’ve been better played off as a supernatural event.

I don’t think it’s meant to add up, it’s more of a big metaphor than anything (which is a criticism I can sort of agree with). I don’t think it would have been a better film if it had been a supernatural event because then it would have been stripped of basically all meaning.

and about the cloning project, we aren’t exactly given a timeline but they weren’t all created by the cloning group themselves. we know for sure that at least tethered Adelaide gave birth to her two children herself, so we’re led to assume that that’s a pretty big reason for the population growing

@rattleshnake imo the conclusion is massively important to the story. The fact that doppelganger Adelaide managed to live a perfectly normal life after escaping the underground is meant to show that the only reason the tethered ended up differently is because of the environment they were raised in. Without the twist I don’t think it would have been nearly as meaningful, although some earlier parts of the film (namely the conversation between the two Adelaides in the house at the beginning) don’t make much sense in retrospect due to Peele of course trying to hide the secret until the end

Yeah, I see what the film is trying to do. More often then not, we are our own worst enemy and biggest threat (which is very true) but I feel the dots don’t connect well enough for the message to translate completely or at least smoothly. Although you may be right about supernatural bit going against the meaning, I feel the film missteps a bit because it was trying to have that meaning.

Also, the problem with the cloning project is that while I can picture that the government or whoever was behind it is twisted enough to want to do such a thing, it just feels impossible that they actually have the resources to pull it off, especially since the film begins in 1986, which means this project was years in the making. The technology to clone on such a massive scale wouldn’t exist.

It was fun, it was enjoyable, I liked it.
The first one’s better though. It’s a better-built package designed to be a tongue-in-cheek way of playing with the concept that it’s a 2 hour advertisement for LEGO. And it works, even as a film. In this new one, it continues the plot from the last one (literally starting off where the last one ended which was a tiny bit jarring as an opening to a film), but I’ve got to say… It’s become what it sought to make fun of, but that may have been unavoidable from the start based on how big the first film property has become. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are still writers for this film, and their comedy still works for the best like the last time, though with a few moments that unfortunately fell flat for my theater.

Don’t get me wrong, this sequel is still at times very entertaining and interesting, with some fun jokes, new and old running jokes taken from the previous film (that I also recently re-watched), cool visuals, souped-up Lego special effects, and even some fun and catchy musical numbers (yup, they turned this one into a semi-musical.)
But, I think the plot takes quite a few liberties in getting away with things – sometimes literally. There’s a scene in which there’s two characters stuck in a jam, and one of them brings out this device called a CBD. A “Convenient Plot Device” that they actually name drop. Which literally gets them out of the problem they’re currently encountering and on to the next plot point.
There’s also a few concepts of world-building that this movie expands upon from its predecessor like the real-world visions and sequences, but in my opinion the way in which it uses them at times really breaks the logic of the fiction we see on the screen, even just the plot itself. Now, the film does wave this away a bit, easily claiming that it’s just “an expression of the destruction of imagination within an adolescent”, but even that doesn’t sit right with what the world has established.
Big spoiler: This is also a movie that even has a twist villain, but that’s something I still don’t have a fully-constructed opinion on. In retrospect, it’s interesting and makes a bit of sense, but again, with the world they’ve set up in the previous film, this feels like it contradicts and breaks stuff within the fiction of the world.

I liked it though. If you’re a fan of the first one, go see it and you’ll probably enjoy it.If I were good at rating things I’d give this a 7.5/10.

After some consideration of the spoilery points below, I’ve decided to boost the film up to an 8.0. The plot I find still a bit contrived and less tight, but the messages behind the film and its characters did have a good impact on me, I just failed to see the full picture.

EDIT: OKAY… After having the day to think about it, look up things I may have missed while watching the film, and seeing other people’s impressions on it, it’s a better movie than I originally thought. It’s just one of those deals where you have to think about how each strand of info in the film ties into the whole product. (there’s some foreshadowing and hidden meanings that I kind of missed)
So, if I’ve got this right…

Now, the main problem I had with the film was how the twist villain seemed to come out of nowhere and didn’t sit right with me. Just felt weird to introduce in the final act and I felt it didn’t explain that much. So, Rex is Emmet from the future – the hardened, “mature” Emmet. He went back in time to make Emmet mature because he spent years in isolation, seeing the evil Sister take the Brother’s toys and play with them. He wanted to prevent that so he went back to breed Emmet into being cold and a rugged person.

Weird, but, (1) this was apparently foreshadowed in an earlier vision in the film, where the Brother tells his sister that “he’s doing this complicated time travel story”, meaning he can’t play with her, and (2) keeping in mind that most of this movie series is about the adventures this young boy puts his toys through as well as a metaphorical representation of things going on in the real world, this aspect of the story represents the Brother’s want to be more mean and serious because he can’t understand that his sister just wanted to play with him and his toys just like he did himself alone, or with the Dad in the previous movie. It doesn’t really fit into the picture of the Fictional world of Lego here (as there’s the real-world scenes that interfere with that), but it does for the real world on its own.

This partially leads into the next point about how the whole movie is about the Brother’s struggle to get his own toys and possessions back from his sister, not comprehending that his sister just wants to play with him. In the beginning, we are shown Emmet giving the Duplo aliens a Lego heart as a sign of peace. Apparently he says that they’re “special” because they can make this whatever they want it to be". Cue them disassembling the heart and taking it with them. This is later revealed to be Queen Whatev’ra Wanabe… But, in the real world, this aspect represents the Sister taking the heart as an gift and as act of love making it her own. She then tries to play with her brother – and her being like 4 or 5 at the time has no sense of control or carefulness, so she does more bad than good. This creates the idea in the Brother’s head that she is the antagonist, meant to destroy his stuff and take it for her own. Despite the sister’s attempts to convince him otherwise (shown in the song “Not Evil”), he isn’t convinced. He wants to maintain his serious persona – possibly because he doesn’t want to play with her “girly” Lego – but mostly because he still doesn’t trust her. That’s why in the end, Emmet and Rex are the bringing of Ar-Mom-ageddon. It’s the representation of him unable to cooperate and trust his sister with his possessions (and also the uniting of his toys with her toys – Batman marrying a girly thing), leading to this rift in their relationship – and subsequently their toys.

Saw Shazam! yesterday, I found it charming, funny and fun, but it did feel like a movie from another time (for instance in terms of visual design.
Doctor Sivana and the sin-demons or whatever are some pretty lame villains and the score seemed entirely anonymous to me.